The typical problem with BT is that it devours bandwidth and gets you busted by Hollywood. The other problem is that it also devours disk space. I solved the first problem using Swedish Internets, but my disk problem was actually exacerbated by using a VM.

In the past, I would just throw a big drive into a dinky little Atom CPU box and snarf torrents all day. When I set up my Proxmox cluster, my VMs were still using local drives. For a while, my Turnkey Linux Torrent Server VM had a 500GB virtual disk. That worked ok. I would grab videos and whatnot and copy them to my NAS for viewing, and once I seeded my torrents back 300%, I would delete them. This was fine until I set up a RetroPie and started grabbing giant ROM sets from a private tracker.

Private trackers are great for making specialized warez easy to find. The problem is that they track the ratio of what you download compared to what you upload, and grabbing too much without seeding it back is a no-no. I now find myself grabbing terabytes of stuff that I have to seed indefinitely. Time to put more disk(s) into the cluster.

I spent way too much money on my NAS to keep fretting about the hard drives on individual machines, virtual or otherwise. So the obvious choice was to toss a disk in and attach it to the VM through the network. I like using containers for Linux machines because the memory efficiency is insane. My research indicated that the best move with containers was to use CIFS. I couldn’t get that to work, so I went with the tried and true way: NFS. NFS is really the way to go for Unix to Unix file sharing. It’s fast, and fairly easy to setup. It also doesn’t seem to work with Proxmox containers, because kernel mode something or another… based on the twenty minutes I spent looking into the situation.

So I rebuilt my torrent server as a VM, and used NFS to mount a disk from my NAS like so:

The rest of the permissions mean it’s read/write and that basically anyone can modify the contents. These are terrible permissions to use for file shares the require privacy and security. They’re fine for stolen videos and games tho.

Once that is in place, you can mount it:

mount /srv/storage

And you’re set.

Because the disk is on my NAS, I can also share it using CIFS, and mount it to my Windows machines. This is handy for when I download a weekly show, I can watch it directly from the Downloads folder and then delete it once it’s done seeding. I like doing this for programs that will end up on Netflix, where I just want to stay current, rather than hanging on to the finished program.

This worked out so well that I decided to spin up a Turnkey Linux Media Server. For this little project, I basically duplicated the steps above, using the folder I have my videos shared on. So far, I have it working for serving cartoons to my daughter’s Roku TV, and my Amazon Fire Stick. I have plans to set the Emby app up on the kid’s Amazon Fire Tablets soon, once I figure out the app situation which is probably going to involve side loading or some other kind of Android fuckitude.

Of course, my media files aren’t properly named or organized, so I will have to write a script to fix all of that 🙂

UPDATE: During the holidays, the private tracker in question did an event where you could download select ROM sets for free and get a bonus for seeding them, so the brand new disk I bought filled up and I had to buy another. I couldn’t migrate a single disk to RAID0, so I had to move the data off the disk, build the new array, and then move the data to it. An operation that took something like 36 hours for 4TB via USB 3.

chris@chrizzle23.com

Husband, Father, Veteran, cypher punk, hacker spacer, gamer, lover of privacy, free speech, and filthy scumm pirates. My opinions are my own and do not reflect those of hive13, Cinci2600, or my current employer.